Mozilla removes Bypass Paywalls Clean extension from its add-ons repository | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla removes Bypass Paywalls Clean extension from its add-ons repository

ghacks.net

321 pointshexage1814210 comments

> This is how the internet should be, free for everyone, without censorship and restrictions.

I wonder if the author writes this content for free or if they expect to be paid. Given Ghacks' privacy policy where 12+ categories of personal data tracking are in use, including precise geolocation, I suspect they do expect compensation for their work, and that it is funded through targeted advertising that requires surveillance tech and data gathering.

If the choice is between publishers setting prices for their products or readers being forced to unwillingly participate in the advertising surveillance industry, I'll take the walls.

But there probably is no such choice. The money Ghacks makes collecting and selling sensitive personal data is probably so sweet it couldn't be replaced by subscriptions.

Just saying, the author should probably think a little deeper about their "free for everyone without restriction" idealogy.

Are you referring to the author of the article or the author of the plug-in?

Yeah, I'm not sure you've exactly said it, but what you see with most walls, is that you can pay for the content, but they USE that payment info to track you and sell it to make even more!

I'm appreciating the down votes. Perhaps YT or Apple don't sell info (for how long?), but HBO, NYT, Disney, and of course Amazon certainly do. Conde' Nast, and probably and your favorite blog/mag as well. Is it surprising, there's money on the table and an identifiable account!?

It used to be said that if you aren't the customer you are the product. Now we get to be both the customer AND the product.

No, you have it wrong. Journalists should live off air, sunlight, and river water. They have no need for money and expecting to get paid is simply greedy.

Nobody is forcing people who want to pay, to not pay. Most news papers make more or their money from advertisers, promotions, and such sources.

Journalist != newspaper.

if the journalist works for the newspaper, then the dichotomy falls apart. Journalists that are independent can use platforms like Substack, where their readers would pay them.

The New York Times makes considerably more money from subscription services than from advertising. That's a recent (last ten-fifteen years) pivot.

You can’t force people to value what journalists produce and the reality is most people don’t value it, like at all.

Most people simply aren’t going to pay, so articles/sites might as well go behind a hard, credit card and login enforced paywall at this point. That way only those who pay can get access, there’s no workarounds, any republished articles can be easily DMCA’d, and republishers can be banned/sued.

Easy to bypass soft paywalls are going to be bypassed no matter what publishers/writers do, so it’s time to take a harder stance. If their content is economically viable they’ll be fine.

Frankly I was legitimately hoping this would be the viable use case for crypto. Allow a JS miner to run while you read and the profits go to the publisher. Like everything else crypto it was a dead on arrival idea thanks to bad actors.

I do think people value it, even the people railing against the "lamestream media" or whatever they call it these days value journalism as a concept, which is why sites like Breibart and such exist. I suspect many people are also willing to pay; the thing is that it's just hard to compete with free: why pay when you can get the same (or something very identical) for free? It's kind of a race to the bottom.

Journalism in my country dumped the early internet formula and are now behind paywalls. They are making a profit.

In rich countries there has always been and always will be an elite that values and can pay for information. Subscription is an old model that has proven to work for centuries. The government official working at the foreign office reads a quality newspaper.

Media almost commited suicide when they adopted the advertising model.

The vast majority of journalists are barely performing what any rational person would call journalism, and for the most part they're providing "journalism" on the same shit that 50 other journalists are covering too.

Your points are about the website "ghacks" ot about the plugin?

there is no relation between he add-on, its maintainers, and the site this article is hosted.

My comments are about the quotation at the top, which appears in the article.

That's a good argument for why they should be allowed to put those things on the website or install those types of technologies. But it's not a good argument for why I shouldn't be allowed to do whatever I want with my computer.

Well you are... But Mozilla is allowed to do whatever they want with their computer (server) too...

And in turn we're allowed to criticize them for it.

On mobile it's a different story, they don't let you install custom add-ons at all.

I use Firefox Nightly on Android since it allows all add-ons

It allows all on AMO, as far as I can tell you cannot add an addon directly from github for instance like you can for the desktop browser.

Only from the repo. That's the problem due to this removal.

On desktop you can still add the XPI manually but on mobile Mozilla doesn't alow that for whatever weird reason.

I don't mind newspapers using paywalls. I even pay for a couple of newspapers myself.

I just wish Google search would block all such newspapers. I'm probably not going to subscribe to any more newspapers, so all the walled results are just extra spam on top of my search results.

It seems to me newspapers want to have their cake and eat it too.

I grow tired of folks thinking that every journalist somehow magically has control over the business activities of the site, and use that to undermine what they say.

Enough already.

It is these journalists' own choice to publish those words within that context or manner, and they of all people should understand the implications this has on the perception of their validity.

Are you’re saying that they shouldn’t even bother to try and effect change?

Not implying anything beyond what I wrote

If it was you, @donohoe, who downvoted my previous comment, then perhaps I misinterpreted your question and would kindly invite you to rephrase it

No, I did not down-vote it.

The statement "this is how the internet should be, free for everyone, without censorship and restrictions" comments on the business activities of online publications, without offering any alternative.

It's pretty on-topic in this specific instance.

The author also wrote "Top 4 Chrome ad blockers that you need to know about"[1] which rails against ads. So they don't want paywalls. They don't want ads. Then what?

It seems their views on all of this are rather unsophisticated (yet they still make broad sweeping statements about it).

[1]: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/08/12/best-chrome-ad-blocker-ext...

If I had the ability to use the internet and never had links to content that refuses to be presented with out ads or paywalls, then I would gladly do so. Unfortunately that isn't an option, so I use ad block. I am convinced that 95%+ of the content we view on the internet today would still exist if there was no way to monetize it. But because it's monetized, we have the same news story, same recipe, same how-to guide, etc all repeated a million times over. It creates a ton of garbage and fluff and noise that brings no value to the planet to be duplicated so many times.

When I meet a paywall, I hit the back button.

When too many JS pop-ups appear, I hit the back button.

Rarely does a website deny access when they detect ad-block, but I’ll happily hit the back button.

Website owners can do whatever they want. I’m not going to look at ads, and that’s a personal choice.

This is why I'm pissed that Twitter bought Scroll. One of the more successful attempts to date at an alternative funding model for content producers.

The primary author of the website (Martin) sold the website to Softonic https://www.ghacks.net/2019/10/07/ghacks-has-a-new-owner-and... .

Choice between trackers or paywalls? What colour would sir like his unicorn?

The Times is one local example of a paywall site. They demand a subscription, and still show targeted ads full of trackers. These companies aren't looking for alternative revenue streams they want additional revenue streams.

> I wonder if the author writes this content for free or if they expect to be paid.

Does your personal expectation of getting your business model validated enjoy the privilege of stifling everyone else's ability to benefit from a free internet?

I mean, the internet was already around way before paywalls were invented.

And does your business model enjoy this exclusive privilege or does each and every business model have the right to strong arm everyone you deem a market to lose rights?

"I wonder if the author writes this content for free or if they expect to be paid. "

I would think that the fact they make the filter list available to use for free in uBlock Origin answers this question. They may hope and expect you'll use the extension that (to judge from other comments) talks to Google Analytics. But they are clearly not expecting to be paid in the way the Wall Street Journal is. Not saying that invalidates your point that content producers deserve to be paid; just saying you can't prove it with hypocrisy.

Developer Edition and ESR (behind a flag) support unsigned extensions [0]. It's not possible to self-sign them, and standard release Firefox won't accept them (there's also unbranded builds that do not verify signatures). I don't like it myself, but whenever I recall the absurd amount of malicious addons that would install themselves in browsers up until about a decade ago into the average person's PCs, I think it's a fair decision, but development of web extensions is still a massive pain. If the removal is not undone, I think they'll be asked to take down the signed xpi they're hosting like [1] were.

>Self-distributing a version that we rejected due to policy violations is circumventing our review process and our policies. We ask that you stop self-hosting rejected and/or violating versions immediately (by Friday, Dec 2). Otherwise we might have to block your add-on from running in Firefox.

0. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing

1. https://github.com/orgs/ActivityWatch/discussions/818#discus...

> >Self-distributing a version that we rejected due to policy violations is circumventing our review process and our policies. We ask that you stop self-hosting rejected and/or violating versions immediately (by Friday, Dec 2). Otherwise we might have to block your add-on from running in Firefox.

Blocking a sideloaded add-on from running for any reason other than it being unambiguous malware world be a major abuse of power and breach of trust on Mozilla's part.

> The add-on won't be on Mozilla's add-on store again though (DMCA takedown).

> Edited by magnolia1234 12 minutes ago

From the GH page, guess they got their notification.

Source: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

That DMCA reference makes no sense. The addon doesn't distribute any copyrighted content.

It also sets a pretty worrying precedent. What is the advertisers start claiming uBlock Origin messes with their copyright?

"[The DMCA] criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA

Fair enough, I didn't know that. This law doesn't apply to me though as an EU citizen.

The question is: Is it really DRM if they provide access to google for free? After all, this is the loophole that these addons use. They pretend to be a crawler, or they block some kind of javascript the bots don't parse.

There's a good chance that the EU has an almost identical law or interpretation.

Indeed:

"Article 6 of the Copyright Directive requires that Member States must provide 'adequate legal protection' against the intentional circumvention of 'effective technological measures' designed to prevent or restrict acts of copying not authorised by the rightholders of any copyright."

More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Society_Directive#...

> This law doesn't apply to me though as an EU citizen.

Ok. Mozilla is in the US, so they are choosing not to host this as hosting it may cause them to be violating the DMCA and subject to criminal prosecution.

> Is it really DRM if they provide access to google for free? After all, this is the loophole that these addons use. They pretend to be a crawler, or they block some kind of javascript the bots don't parse.

That's pretty clearly working around the intent of the access controls, yeah.

> That's pretty clearly working around the intent of the access controls, yeah.

Is it? Youtube-dl had the following argumentation [1]:

  For a subset of videos, YouTube employs a mechanism it calls a "signature." Here is our understanding of how it works: when a user requests certain YouTube videos, YouTube's servers send a small JavaScript program to the user's browser, embedded in the YouTube player page. That program calculates a number referred to as "sig." That number then forms part of the Uniform Resource Locator that the user's browser sends back to YouTube to request the actual video stream. This mechanism is completely visible to the user simply by viewing the source code of the player page. The video stream is not encrypted, and no secret knowledge is required to access the video stream. JavaScript is a ubiquitous technology found on millions of websites and understandable by numerous software programs. Any software capable of running JavaScript code can derive the URL of the video stream and access the stream, regardless of whether the software has been approved by YouTube. To borrow an analogy from literature, travelers come upon a door that has writing in a foreign language. When translated, the writing says "say 'friend' and enter." The travelers say "friend" and the door opens. As with the writing on that door, YouTube presents instructions on accessing video streams to everyone who comes asking for it.

Why shouldn't this apply to this addon? They are not decrypting anything, they don't have secret knowledge to access the article and plaintext JS is anything but unreadable bytecode. If you can merely change your referrer to "facebook.com" or your user agent to "googlebot" to get the article text, then it is hardly any serious DRM. This addon is NOT sharing cookies or using stolen logins. If publishers really wanted to stop people from freely accessing the articles, they could just make a login-wall or token-validation like the German publishers spiegel.de, bild.de etc.

And yes, ROT-13 wouldn't be an adequate protection either.

[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...

Working around access control and working around copyright are different things.

Bypass Paywalls Clean is, by definition, solely to subvert paywalls and thus copyright.

youtube-dl is a general purpose YouTube video downloader. You are not working around any access controls, since the videos are free and available on the web. Furthermore, you could use it to download a video you yourself created, or you were granted explicit permission to download. Just because it happens to work for copyright-protected videos is not relevant, since the tool is not specifically for working around copyright.

DRM circumvention requires a court order to take down, despite the recent YouTube-dl takedown. So yes, it could be that, but the software author should get more than a message from Mozilla.

DMCA should really then have a case of the century on their hands suing every web browser shop on earth for all they have, since they all have these features that circumvent these paywalls too: the stop button you can hit before the paywall loads.

Or the inspect panel. Or the ability to download a local copy of a page for later modification. Or tools that allow you to inspect HTTP requests. Or screen readers that look at underlying page data instead of what's visually present. Or web crawlers.

We need legislation to outlaw wget and curl

> services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works

A soft paywall that can be removed by modifying HTML elements on a page doesn't seem like an actual control for copyrighted material, since the server has already provided you the entirety of the copywritten work and it exists on your computer in plain text (within markup). That they're choosing to do that is on them. I am lawfully accessing their website and how I interact with the local copy of data that they send me is 100% my business as long as I'm not redistributing it.

Are youtube downloader extensions next?

uBlock doesn't do anything without a rules list. It has a set of filters it ships with, but if gorhill didn't load those by default, the extension isn't in violation of anything.

The RIAA is already trying to push for YouTube downloaders to be considered DMCA 1201 circumvention devices.

The thing is, a lot of us here have the understanding that "encryption equals technical protection", and that's not quite true. The law was drafted to talk about any sort of copyright enforcement mechanism, not just ones that employ cryptography. For example, we could imagine a legal argument in which the Linux linker's license check[0] is considered to be a DMCA 1201 technical protection measure, and proprietary modules that lie about their license[1] or modules that wrap proprietary code[2] would be considered circumvention tools.

If you're thinking, "wait, Linux is GPL, the courts should interpret that to override any spurious 1201 claims"... well, version 2 didn't explicitly mention the DMCA, which was signed a good decade after GPLv2 was released. Version 3 fixes that by explicitly saying none of this code is a DMCA 1201 technical protection measure. But this is Linux we're talking about. Linus Torvalds views the TiVo clause as changing the deal, which he does not want to allow, so they're never relicensing to v3, and so this legal argument can still stand.

And yes, advertisers have already used this legal theory to harass uBlock Origin. This is specifically why they don't block paywall enforcement scripts. The developers were threatened with a 1201 suit if they didn't back down.

There's other examples of things which could be retroactively turned into DMCA 1201 circumvention devices as well. Remember those old right-click scripts that yelled at you if you tried to open the context menu? Well, the purpose of blocking that was to keep you from copying the content on the page, which under this legal theory makes it a DMCA 1201 circumvention device. Doesn't matter if it's hilariously easy to disable, or if browsers already disable it. If copyright owners can just will technical protection measures into existence, rather than them being very specific and obvious things like media encryption or software license keys, we're screwed.

[0] When loading a kernel module, Linux checks a license string field. If the license is not a GPL-compatible one, the linker will refuse to resolve "GPL-only[1]" symbols for that module, and it will also mark kernel bug reports as "tainted", i.e. "please don't bother LKML about it unless you can repro it without proprietary code in kernel space."

[1] Linux ships with a special GPL exception that says that the user-space API does not trip GPL copyleft. So the symbols that proprietary modules are allowed to access are ones that are equivalent to user-space.

[2] One particularly egregious example was to store nulls in the license string, e.g. "GPL\0 for everything in the GPL folder" (which was empty).

[3] e.g. NDISWrapper

If that was a DMCA takedown, sounds like clearcut DMCA abuse. Copyright is not an arbitrary paywall enforcement system for corporations!

The web needs a "doctor's office" model for media subscriptions. I recalled that when print newspapers and magazines were a thing I would read articles in the New York Times or Time magazine without paying because the current issues were provided gratis in a doctor's waiting room. Or dentist, or a restaurant, or even someone leaving it on a bus seat.

The publishers overlooked the potential for shared subscriptions when they transitioned to digital. Or they resented it because of the lost money it represents.

I'm able to read most of those on my tablet via Libby/Overdrive, but my library's digital collection seems to be better than most. I've tried to setup my parents in another state with the same service using their local library cards, and the selection is pretty slim by comparison.

That existed for a few years, it was called "Scroll" and then it got bought by Twitter and merged into Twitter Blue, which caused me to cancel my subscription. As far as I can tell nothing has really happened with it since then.

Is there anything more to your argument than that you want your media for free and don't want to pay for it?

There's no reason why businesses shouldn't be working with library systems on these. Papers like nyt claim to be the paper of record but make it as hard as possible to actually read in the supposed paper of record. Doesn't hurt the HN demographic any to pay for these subscriptions, but there is a whole segment of the population that is now left out and excluded from reading "the authoritative" take on events because its yet another recurring charge they have to make room for in their already strained budget. Somehow I feel like that doesn't leave our society better off than the alternative of being a little bit more permissive with who gets to read the news.

Huh TIL, added to ublock origin!

That extension was constantly asking me for new site permissions as they adjusted the filter list. Grateful to the developers for their work but think I might actually prefer the ublock addition going forward.

It's here FYI https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filter...

As an experiment, I added the list to uBlocker earlier today. It wasn't the same as running the extension directly. For example, for WSJ ariticles, the extension falls back to AMP pages if it can't unblock. uBlock list, however, failed to fall back, so I wasn't able to read WSJ.

It doesn't seem to work with all sites. Seems that there is more to it than just a blocklist.

i picked the wrong day to rebuild my firefox browser. I noticed the extension mission, and couldnt find it in the add-ons store. Thought i was going crazy.

hmmff

I didn't know I needed this! Thank you Mozilla for creating a Streisand Effect.

Just installed it on Google Chrome.

well in a while google chrome isn't going to let you do that anymore!

Hasn't the new uBlock for manifest v3 been working?

As long as you have the developer mode on Iridium, you will. What I'd like it's the same concept but for a standalone micro-proxy, such as 'miniproxy' from tedu@. I mean, I fire up Dillo, Lynx, Links, whatever. It automatically redirects me to an unpaywalled web.

Edge already refuses to install it through the .CRX file, even in developer mode. I have it installed by loading the unpacked version using these instructions:

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean...

This means it's a good one. Checking it out, now. I love it when this kind of thing backfires.

The pay that can be bypassed with a FF add on is not a “wall”. They want the pay but don’t want to invest to build a solid wall, I’d say good luck.

They want to have their cake and eat it. Lure people in with content indexed by Google and then ask for money when they want to view it. Bait and switch.

It used to be that displaying content to the google bot that is different to what you show actual users could get you delisted from google, did something change?

They're referring to free access when google is the referral source, but paid otherwise. This has never been disallowed.

Furthermore, Google wants everything to be accurately indexed so giving Google access so they can index it wouldn't be frowned upon. This is usually done by putting the title and first paragraph online but hiding the rest of the article.

The trick to find an article for free by searching for it and having Google be the referral seems to not work almost all the time these days.

So will (did?) Mozilla stop signing the extension, too?

The article talks about installing usnigned version (like that's possible for people who want to run normal Firefox).

Publishers are in a tough spot these days. Especially small ones.

On the one hand, there is no marketplace for unobtrusive ads without JavaScript. So if publishers use what is available (AdSense etc), half of their users will block the ads and the other half will hate them.

On the other hand, paywalls are also hated and when publishers use those, half of their users will stop being users and the other half will circumvent the paywall.

What would be cool is a marketplace for simple static text (and static image) ads. Similar to affiliate links, but with an automatism to find out which ads perform best on a given page.

I recently tried to promote paid services by other indie entrepreneurs with simple text links. No JS, not tracking, just a simple text link "If you like, check out this product by a fellow indie entrepreneur" and the results were pretty promising. It's just a lot of friction to do it manually. With an automated marketplace, this might make the web a better place.

I would like a model where I can pay per article on a website. I am not going to subscribe to Bloomberg because I can’t fit it in my budget, but from time to time I would like the ability to read a single article (either linked from here or from a colleague) and would be willing to pay a small fee.

Wish someone (Apple?) would figure this out

The problem with this seems to be the nonexistence of micropayments.

As far as I know, there is no viable solution to pay $0.01.

Which is a pitty, because $0.01 per page would be a CPM of $10 which is crazy high. For most publishers, that would be a big increase in their earnings.

Why couldn't I load up my account with $10 or so every month, and have a centralized solution tally up all my consumption and distribute it to all publishers.

That solution would probably also charge a lot, like the credit card companies.

Also, a lot of media sites use the personal information they collect with your account for tracking, which they'd probably lose some of since they won't be the one billing you anymore.

honestly, I would probably subscribe to apple news if they did this. Or another similar tool I want to support good journalism, but I don't want to have multiple subscriptions to manage and deal with.

Brave browser does this. Unfortunately I don't think that they have great adoption.

Last time I asked if they could offer this, they said no. Instead they were pushing their cryptocurrency scam while blocking site owners' advertising.

I feel like a few companies have tried this over the years..

The concept of a tip jar that you'd fund and then be able to disburse on participating websites.

Then payments could just be aggregated and paid out periodically from the tip jar provider to the publisher..

But you need some kind of critical mass for this (both users and publishers), and I don't think anyone has cracked this yet..

For an org that has an enduring billing relationship with the customer (think the large tech companies and platform providers), they already are handling transaction aggregation internally to an extent - just not to the extent of micro-transactions (where they need to handle the edge case of a tiny single transaction in a day or week or month).

If you make a few app store transactions in a day, I believe apple aggregates these into a single transaction that's posted to the card. That model could help here, though obviously it won't help for ultra low usage though. Pre-paid models might work, but those have their own challenges, and all of this points towards a centralised gatekeeper knowing everything a user reads (or at least which top level publishers they read content from).

Anything under 50c is ridiculously low. If some content is not worth even 50c, why would it be worth your time spent consuming it?

$0.01 is too low, but $0.50 is way too high except for longer articles. I read so much on a day that paying 50c for every article would ruin me.

If you need to read them for your job, that is just a business expense. If you read them for your leisure and they're not even worth 50c to you, then that sounds like you are wasting your time.

For leisure / keeping up with the world (you know, democracy and such), and wow are you judgmental.

I am not judging you, I'm trying to understand why you want to spend your time on content that you yourself consider not even worth a pittance?

Their comment appears to be about ability to pay, not value.

Well, there was flattr, not sure what they're doing these days, though.

> As far as I know, there is no viable solution to pay $0.01.

There are a few coins in the crypto space that could legitimately handle this, such as Nano. Its transactions are fee-less and generally confirmed in under a second.

There's a viable model: credits. You don't pay $0.01, you pay say $10 for 1,000 pages. Most web companies usually provide a lowest offering that's geared towards reasonably heavy users and provide nothing other than ads and the like for light users. Hence the ongoing war between blasting us with ads and sometimes malicious ads vs keeping from destroying our experience and risking getting infected by the latest 0-day.

The thing that killed micropayments back in the early 2000s (when Scott McCloud was calling for them) was transaction costs. Putting a paywall on every click is a sales and user experience nightmare. Keep in mind that the reason why everyone uses subscription billing nowadays is that you never have to bug the user to ask for more money. You just ask once and get paid indefinitely.

There are micropayments that do sort of work - for example, cellphone plans that bill per megabyte of "data". But even then that only works because mobile operating systems and apps do not provide a way to anticipate data costs. There is no cost displayed next to each link you tap or YouTube video you watch. If there was, nobody would use their phones. Usage-based billing is actually one of my pet peeves for exactly this reason.

What we really want is an all-you-can-eat model that just gives us what we had back in the Advertising Will Pay For It era of news. Except that will never exist because everyone knows how platform capitalism works. Once you condition users to pay a fixed amount per month, then all the creators on your platform - or, in this case, news organizations - are playing a zero-sum game. Because they are being paid out of one pot and the only way to make that pot bigger is to do the platform's advertising job for you. This is what happened with Spotify and Netflix, with the added intrigue of the platform playing artists off one another with original content and exclusives.

On a more technical level, transaction networks are expected to provide fraud insurance, and that bills at a tune of 30 cents per transaction. Any mechanism to shave pennies off your wallet will be abused to commit untold amounts of tiny fraudulent transactions. For example, imagine installing a browser extension that, in the background, starts loading up your news articles without the user's knowledge. That's the sort of thing that will kill a microtransaction system long-term.

> Wish someone (Apple?) would figure this out

That would probably be a proprietary solution working only on iOS and Macs with Safari. How that solves the problem for Android devices and Windows/Linux computers, maybe also for Macs with a non Safari browser?

So what? Why should they care about Android or Linux users?

The problem we're talking about here is pervasive, and needs a more or less universal solution, not something vendor-specific. So, while Apple has no reason to care about non-Apple users, we, as a society, should.

Well if Apple does it for their users and future users, that is much better than nobody doing it.

Apple is already paying a few publishers I think, but not at scale.

Netflix, Amazon or Spotify could probably pull of a subscription model with their huge critical masses.

But I dont think anyone with the critical mass for a micropayment model has any motivation to do it. Google, Apple are perfectly happy with the 30% app fee, the massive cut taken from YouTube and so on.

> and would be willing to pay a small fee.

Current payment systems do not allow for lots of small fees, when credit card processors charge 25c and up per transactions.

The only way that works that I can think of would be a browser that charges a fee of say $10 per month from users and then distributes that to the pages visited, based on usage. Brave browser seemed like a step in this direction, but turned out to be just another crypto scam.

It doesn't have to be a subscription, you can have a "wallet" that users add to periodically in increments of $10 or something. Blendle was a service like this, you made a single smallish purchase to add money to your wallet and then slowly spent ~25 cents per article until you needed to top up again.

Yes, I think a system like this is the future. I also think whoever pulls it off successfully has to understand that they are not supposed to be editors or see their mission as trying to bundle established media, since the most interesting content creators right now are people way outside the "mainstream".

There are a lot of issues with this, but a big one is that this has a dependency on cross-site tracking: Blendle or whoever needs to learn the sites you visit so they can decrement your wallet. And all the browsers are working on making cross-site tracking technologically impossible.

That's not a problem. Implement a "Login with Blender" Single sign on for participating sites and you're done.

Blender should be Blendle there. Sorry, autocorrect.

I don't think a pay-per-article model really works; Blendle[1] tried this, and they ended up switching to a subscription model. Having to decide "do I want to pay for this article?" isn't really what I want; I also paid for some articles that I ended up finding seriously shallow/disappointing.

Many publishers have also stopped publishing on Blendle over the years. I guess they decided it wasn't profitable for them (or not profitable enough). The platform is still around, but I expect it won't be in a few years. It's still around, but the offering is severely reduced compared to a few years ago; I don't expect it will be around in a few years.

I do agree it's a problem; I don't really want to subscribe to one or two newspapers in particular, but rather get interesting stuff from HN and other sources from a wide variety of publications. It would be prohibitively expensive to subscribe, so, I subscribe to two publications and bypass the paywalls on the rest. I don't know what else to do beyond, I guess, just not read it at all...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

The basic problem here is few companies are willing to be cooperative. Look at the video market: We used to have a good solution: Netflix. However, a bunch of companies decided they wanted a bigger piece of the pie and now we have a whole bunch of competing streaming services which basically got rid of the idea.

It's not that Netflix wasn't a viable model, it was the companies being piggish. We see something of the sort with cable & satellite packages--companies who want to take a bigger piece of the pie and get upset when they get dropped or put into a separate package. The cost of entry into that market is so much higher that it hasn't totally fallen apart like the Netflix approach (yeah, Netflix is still out there--but the concept of being a one place for everything is gone. Too many companies want something exclusive to hope to lure you to them.)

Bluntly: I really don't think you do.

You think you do, but you don't.

Imagine you hit that paywall, and it says "get a subscription or pay 0.50c to see this one article".

You seriously want me to believe you're gonna go bust out your wallet and punch in your credit card details and pay a fraction of a dollar instead of just closing the window and moving on?

Okay, how about we reduce the friction and do the Post.news thing: you buy tokens and then use them.

Are you really gonna go buy ten or twenty bucks worth of tokens for the few times when you hit a paid article?

Sorry, no. I don't buy it. Every time I see someone say this, it honestly just sounds like an attempt to justify busting down that paywall or refusing to subscribe. "Gee, I would have paid for this article, but I can't... oh well."

Ala carte payment friction combined with uncertainty about the value of the content (what if I pay a quarter and the article turns out to be garbage?) reduces the value of content to zero for most people. There's a reason no one has been able to make it work.

You might be interested in Blendle [1], a website which offers a variety of publications on a pay-per-article basis where you can charge up a wallet in advance.

They offer publications like Time, the Economist, and the Chicago Tribune. Unfortunately it's somewhat expensive - $0.25-$0.50 per article. And they don't have any sort of automated way to jump from a newspaper's paywall straight to the Blendle article - you've got to find it through Blendle. And there selection of publications is somewhat limited.

But there are companies out there trying to deliver something kind of close to what you're talking about!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

Blendle did this

Apple News+ already does this, except that you pay a flat monthly fee, and they distribute 50% of it to news organizations:

https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/7-facts-publishers-should-k...

Apple News is apparently the #1 news app globally, but it has a free tier. Here are paid subscription trends:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267581/apple-news-plus-...

It would be great if your internet bill was based on your bandwidth, a portion of which covers the hosts fees for you using their bandwidth at some rate set by the isp. In this model, the barrier to create content falls to zero before long as you get readership that is able to sustain its load on your site on its own without the need for shoveling in advertisements or tracking. You'd also incentivize the development of smaller webpages since they would consume less bandwidth and cost less for a user, so given two sites they'd chose the less bloated one over time.

Yeah. My former employer shut down because of that trend, and it has only gotten worse in the years since then. I recently, reluctantly had to adblock APNews because of malware in the ads, and thats not some two-bit organization. Some other sites I love have dropped off my radar, as I can only juggle so many subs.

Web 3.0 may be bollocks, but I hope someone distills a good publisher micropayment system out of it. Or maybe a bulk "Netflix/Spotify for news" would be a better approach?

Apple News

$13/mo and AppleOS only

(Or $10/month, in USD.)

So is your objection paying $13/month?

That's a lot if you only open a few links a month.

It also doesn't at all help people like me who don't use any major news sites at all, but are only redirected to specific articles there through links on platforms like this one.

These services depend on using their aggregator, not any you want.

What does it matter if you found an article you're interested in through HN, reddit, recommendation from a friend? That's the world wide web.

Because you can't read a linked article from HN if you have Apple News.

You'd have to go and manually find the same article in the Apple News app to read it under your subscription terms.

First World Problems much?

> These services depend on using their aggregator, not any you want.

Exactly. It could solve the problem if I was able to create accounts on those news sites, and link my apple account.

Just wanted to point out that we started from a way to dont have subscriptions and go pay as you go and circled all the way back to subscription

And the app crashes constantly while you are in the middle of an article, and dumps you back at he main lading page wen it restarts, and has not been updated in a dogs age so is apparently abandonware.

Is there a nonproprietary way to save articles with apple news? What sucks with these "news apps" is you have no way to organize your research material how you'd like e.g. with a more powerful reference manager. Maybe they should release a research product like how google has scholar.google.com

How do you propose Apple does that? By giving content producers content away without their consent? The News App has content that you would normally have to pay individually for.

I mean, they don't exactly block screenshotting if you really wanted to get at the article and disseminate it using that platform. Say you are a highscooler doing a report on current events. Apple news is no help for you for that if you actually want to manage references easily. Being able to also pull your article list out of apple news and into some other future as of yet uninvented service is also powerful stuff for the end user, but of course apple doesn't care about that since, why should anyone leave the heavenly walled garden of earthly delight they've created? There are of course many reasons why its useful to have a record of your reading that you can manipulate how you'd like.

And if I’m a student citing a reference, how much good does it do if the original reference is behind a paywall?

You don’t have to screen shot anything to get text out of Apple News. You can use the high tech procedure of “selecting the text and copying and pasting”

And if you want to get the original URL, you can also do the very unintuitive option if “copy link”.

For instance if you paste this link into your browser,

https://apple.news/AhwAFsLbdQZaWT1xFsifQ_g

It redirects you here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/ownership...

It really isn’t that hard.

>Web 3.0 may be bollocks, but I hope someone distills a good publisher micropayment system out of it. Or maybe a bulk "Netflix/Spotify for news" would be a better approach?

RSS.

So many RSS feeds these days are basically just "New post - link to site". It's mostly killed the model; what used to be a nice stripped down stream of just the text (and sometimes image) content has become a layer of indirection in the "come look at our ads" shithousery.

This is not true and very bad math. There are four categories:

1. People who are willing to deal with ads and not install an ad blocker

2. People who install an ad blocker

3. People who are willing to pay for content

4. People who are willing to bypass paywalls.

There are plenty of websites that are doing well based the first group and a few individuals and companies doing well in the third group.

> What the web needs is a market place for simple static text (and static image) ads.

No thanks. I'm done with giving advertisers and marketers any consideration at all. They have consistently and measurably made the world worse.

I don't mind paywall. Thing is, they do *both* paywall and tracking, which just discourages me to pay for them. I do pay for services that I feel they respect my privacy.

It isn’t necessary to know how well they performed, so long as they’re known to have been displayed for a period of time. Golf course bench advertising has been around for decades and there’s no UTM parameter on a phone number.

But they could use a different phone number.

The world simply needs a lot less journalists/publishers, compared to even 30 years ago, thanks to the speed at which information propagates on the internet.

The world of journalism and publishing is probably more cutthroat even that show-business and acting, because only the very top pays good livable wages.

It's time for those people to move on and do something that's more in demand in society and pays them a better wage. Descending into the madness that is paywalls and malicious ads certainly isn't it. Sorry if this sounds glum, but that's just the reality.

I don't understand why newspaper ads are so broken. Here in LA county, local businesses love to invest in billboards. Some are notorious with their ad campaigns, but in either case the result is advertising that is at least relevant enough to the local demographic passing through the area to justify leasing them, even hiring painters to create hundred foot mural advertisements on historical buildings that have ordinances requiring such painted advertisements.

Given the seemingly strong and dynamic local advertising market in the real world, you'd think the digital ads in the LA times would mirror this, and reflect local businesses and the occasional national campaign like the billboards do. Instead, its offshored to liveintent, where they fill the adspace with anything from steam irons to pills to improve virility that doctors don't want you knowing about. It just seems like a wasted opportunity to me.

I used to get really annoyed with links posted to HN behind paywalls, then I found paywall bypasser browser plugins that made my life less annoying. I would never go back now and like what, actually pay for news? No, I'll just go find another creative workaround or stop reading news here.

The nerve of people not willing to work for free.

I really only pay for WSJ, I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars every month just for news which I rarely consume. I did some research as to what sort of bias every news source had, and it seemed like WSJ was trusted the most by "both sides" which caught my attention. I wish news didn't lean one way or the other, it's really tiresome. I just want raw facts. Too many a time I see a crazy headline, people losing their minds, only to pull up the source video or what have you, and discover that they jumped the gun and didn't vet anything.

On the right, there are two “sides”, your traditional business oriented conservatives/libertarians and your “populists”/“religious conservatives”. The second group does not trust the WSJ at all and it is considered to be part of the “lamestream media”.

I find the WSJs news articles (which I get through Apple News), to be relatively even handed. Now the op ed is a different story.

For political news, “The Hill” seems to be even handed.

The problem with news and raw facts, is that the incentive to embellish or leave out the raw facts one way or another to drive some narrative is just too damn high. Ignorance is bliss sometimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

I would genuinely consider paying double if not more what I pay for WSJ if I got news that had rich citations and raw sources linked and archived so you can never go "oh darn where did that video go?" and have total certainty that I can look at raw sources and make a more informed decision.

Lol yep. I mean I enjoy free articles here and there but I don't see Mozilla being wrong here

The problem that there's no good way to pay for a single article. People don't want a subscription for the occasional article on an aggregator.

Sort of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

I bet if nyt charged 1 half cent a read versus subscriptions, they'd make more money.

This has been argument since the 90s.

Once you get over the hurdle of getting someone to pay anything, it’s a lot easier to get them to pay more. Besides, you want the people who aspirational will use your service and don’t. You don’t want them to think about.

What’s the cost of acquisition of a customer who is willing to pay a half a cent? What’s the lifetime value of the customer?

Now compare that to a subscription. I would posit that the cost of acquisition is the same for both types of customers and the lifetime value of the latter is a lot lower.

This is like business development 101. The average Shark Tank participant can do this analysis

I think it's rude for people to submit links to articles on HN and for people to vote them to the front page without a warning that the article is paywalled. HN tags PDFs, video submissions. Is it so wrong to ask for notice that a submission is paywalled?

Agreed. People used to post it in the comments but no longer. Tagging it would be nice. The ability to filter them out even more.

How rude! What also really grinds my gears are reading restaurant reviews. Several times I have gone to a restaurant after reading a recommendation and once there they have the nerve to ask me to pay.

this is not at all what's happening here

That's a good initial relevance filter, actually. Unless the writer is zealous enough to invest his time and money in order to convince me of his opinion, the topic probably isn't very important.

The nerve of people not wanting to get stuck in predatory subscription models. Do these outlets still demand an international call at ungodly hours to cancel subscriptions?

Well, I don’t have a habit of doing business with companies I find have an objectionable business model.

The dmca complaint essentially makes this like the DVD copying / flag fiasco all over again.

I really wish publications would push for a bundled model and work together to achieve it. I would pay $15/month to not have to deal with a paywall on major publications; but I don't read them often enough individually to justify the cost. I jump around from The Times, The Post, The New Yorker, WSJ, Economist, and various others. The one publication subscription model works in print...but online when someone shares a link to an Economist article, I'm not paying their fee just for that article when I already pay for 2 others.

Twitter tried to do something like this with Twitter Blue, but it failed miserably and lacked crucial partners, even pre-Elon.

I briefly worked at a startup that was trying to build this. It's technically possible in a lot of different ways, but the business culture is so far removed from this approach that it seems impossible right now. The sites that are still successful are all convinced they are on track to own the entire online news media market and won't do anything to give up an absolute iron grip on their experience and readership, especially if it might mean acknowledging the existence of a competing news source. The smaller regional and local news sites are all basically zombie companies now anyway. They buy an off-the-shelf newspaper CMS tool, add in every possible monetization plugin they can possibly cram into the tool, an AP feed, and hire like 3 part time journalists to add in just enough shallow local flavor that nobody cares about so that they can try to get some clicks in their local market. They aren't motivated to participate in systems that let you buy content, because they don't actually make any content.

I’m on a free trial of Apple News+ right now, but the model is basically pay $10 / month and get access to lots of stuff:

https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/

I really like that the publications don’t get my email or physical address. No spam in my post office box or inbox.

My understanding is that Apple News+ subscribers get access to some of the content from these publishers, but not all of the content.

That could be. I have a 90-day trial and I’m about half way through and so far I haven’t found anything missing, but then I haven’t really been looking.

Anytime I open the app I never have a hard time finding something to read. Seems like a pretty good deal to me. It’s nice that a lot of publications have back issues available as well.

Yeah, but that doesn't help me as a non-Apple customer. There should be a cross-platform attempt at this. I think it really comes down to just publishers being old fashioned.

NYT alone costs > $15/month. Hard to imagine a bundle costing only that, unless it comes with article count restrictions. That would annoy the crap out of me.

$15/mo is just an example, but I would pay even with an article count restriction per publication because I don't constantly read the Times, I just go to various outlets on who seems to have the best story.

Look into your local library system, sometimes you get free access to these papers through your credentials.

I think it's foolish to expect traditional media businesses to do absolutely anything progressive in terms of access to their content. The wide variety of streaming services we have now only exist because they were effectively forced to do it or slowly die out as disrupters did it instead.

"Now, it is possible that one of the sites hit the Bypass Paywalls Clean add-on with a DMCA notice, which in turn could have resulted in Mozilla delisting the extension from its store. I'm not entirely sure about this, because if that was the case, wouldn't Mozilla have notified the developer?"

Before you get outraged, please keep in mind that this is all speculation at this point and there's no official response from Mozilla saying they removed it for the reason of it being a paywall bypass.

Also, AFAIK notification only pertains to one part of DMCA: the "safe harbor" for infringing user-posted content. DRM-breaking tech is banned under a separate section that, to my knowledge, has no equivalent protection for the "service provider". So if Mozilla's lawyers became aware of this add-on, they might have reasonably concluded that hosting it was an unacceptable risk.

It’s still bad that they would remove any add-on without notifying the maintainer of the reason.

"But if we told you why, you could..... subvert the system!"

The maintainer says they received a DMCA notification here: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...

That doesn’t say whether or not they intend to counterclaim, though.

This move is the exact polar opposite of how I'd like Mozilla to behave. And possibly a strong case for decentralization.

It's confusing to me that we keep accepting internet as it is and modifications to what we view - such as ad blockers or paywall removal tools - are so rare. Back in the time Firefox had a major part of the market share, now it's negligible. Instead of using that situation to take brave moves aiming at re-imagining the internet, they succumb to content creators instead of working for the user. I wish some company forked Firefox and took it back in the direction it aimed for.

Also:

> you should have gotten the copy of DMCA take down request. I would love to know who did DMCA take down request.

How is this story NOT about who performed the DMCA take-down?

The Epic Privacy Browser for Windows has this extension built-in. Other platform versions will be getting it soon.

I didn't realize this was a thing! Also, the article notes the extension makes its actual ruleset available, so if you use e.g. uBlock Origin, you can add this as a rules list: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filter...

Nice!

I used this extension for several years but I also didn't know you can use a filter rule for this. I'd like to know what makes Mozilla know what is good for me though.

Talk about the Streissand effect!

Yes for all of the people that both use Firefox and read HN…

I'd make the educated guess that HN contains disproportionally many Firefox users, so the overlap is not quite as small as you (implicitly) suggest. OTOH, any HN discussion will have a paywall-avoiding link posted nearly instantly anyway.

And that’s still a tiny number in the grand scheme of things.

I mean, I think it's a narrower demographic that browse the Firefox extension shop looking for obscure extensions for fun, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's a net increase.

Note that readme in that repo says it isn't quite as good and you may want to use it alongside a user script.

https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filter...

I'm pretty sure that's not a complete set of bypasses. I know for a fact that some bypasses require setting the referrer value (eg. so it's from google/facebook) or setting a specific cookie value. There's no way those can be done from a ublock filter list.

Yeah, this feels like such a Streisand Effect inducer. Vivaldi browser supports these rulesets directly, without any extensions, and for Android users, you can use the AdGuard Content Blocker add on for Samsung Internet Browser to add this as a user rule. I'll be using it everywhere now that I know about it.

This extension is great, I've been using it for a year+. Doesn't work with everything but is more likely to work than any other method I try.

(I acknowledge paywall bypassing is fraught. I do subscribe to several news sites. But I won't subscribe to the 50+ sites I might want to read one article on every few months.)

Anyways you are not missing out from paywalled articles. This will be a never ending battle but it looks like we need an open source extension store :)

https://greasyfork.org/en is sort of what you're looking for

Add it from their github repo

Can turn off JavaScript as an alternative. I admit it won't bypass as much as Bypass Paywalls but works well for sites I often visit.

How does this compare to https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome ?

That was the original. The "clean" version author objected to it asking for a blanket permission for all sites I believe. The original seems to hardly be updated now.

According to TFA, the non-clean version also used Google Analytics.

Oh ok, good point. I didn't remember the discussion from the time in detail and I didn't read TFA because it asked for so many cookie permissions and the opt out button didn't appear :/

uBo or uMatrix are blocking that for me ;)

Strange, I have uBo too and it didn't (on mobile)

Not that strange, it probably simply means uMatrix is responsible ;)

I think it's justifiable to reject ads, because there are more reasons for it than just wanting stuff for free. But bypassing of paywalls IMHO crosses a line. Nobody owes you free content.

Ads almost always come with intrusive tracking, and the adtech industry is out of control. They're full of sleazy dark patterns. They do a poor job filtering phishing and malware. The personalized ad model has devalued reputable publishers and made any clickbait profitable. But if the ads don't pay, something has to.

There are reasonable business and technical reasons why paywalls aren't 100% secure (e.g. potential customers want to sample before buying, subscribers don't like to be forced to log in in in-app browsers that don't remember their cookies, etc.), so the fact that a bypass is technically possible is not an excuse.

I'd argue that people who use this plugin wouldn't pay for the articles anyway. I think we all know why music & film streaming services succeeded :) And I'm sure offerings like Apple News+ will do follow for text.

Anyway, I'm leaving a quote from Gabe Newell here: “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”

The sites targeted by the extension are precisely the ones that tried to be gentle, and don't have DRM nor strict login requirements. This is precisely what Gabe argued for. What else do you expect them to do to?

> [...] don't have DRM nor strict login requirements. This is precisely what Gabe argued for.

No. Gabe did not argue against DRM or logins, but he argued for better service. The steam login wall and DRM are certainly not the better service he meant.

We are still lacking a product with great execution in the news space. I'm expecting something similar to spotify/apple music or steam.

We had one. A great one. Ad-free RSS/Atom feeds from news sites aggregated into a text-only feedreader of your choice. It's mostly gone now.

I can go to the grocery store or library or cafe right now and read the current issue of the nyt and put it back without paying a dime, on the other hand. If someone found an interesting story they'd want to share with me, they could cut it out and give it to me or photocopy it. Its interesting how digital content is often much more locked down than physical alternatives.

i agree. what i would really like is an extension that filters out paywall links in some way - highlights them in red, or makes them unclickable with a hover saying "paywall", or some other thing that keeps me from hitting the page at all.

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